AAA Devs HUMILIATED After Hollow Knight: Silksong Shatters Records With Over Half A Million Players On Day One
Indie Devs Team Cherry Just Did What EA, Ubisoft And Rocksteady Couldn’t, Deliver A Game Worth Playing
Summary
- Hollow Knight: Silksong launch overwhelms storefronts, Steam, Xbox, and Nintendo eShop all crash under record-breaking demand.
- The $20 indie pulled over 517,000 concurrent players in hours, crushing AAA flops like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
- Fans joke that one bug-themed game humiliated billion-dollar publishers as Twitch streams soared past 310,000 viewers.
When a bug can topple giants, you know something’s up. Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited sequel from indie studio Team Cherry, finally arrived, and the internet promptly collapsed under the weight of millions of players hammering “download.”
Steam staggered. Xbox sputtered. Nintendo’s eShop waved the white flag.
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For a few surreal hours, you could watch one tiny indie game bring the entire gaming ecosystem to its knees.
Indie Fever
Indie games have been chipping away at the AAA throne for years, but Silksong feels like a proper dethroning.
Over 517,000 people were playing on Steam alone just a few hours after launch, and that’s not even counting consoles. Add in Twitch numbers, 310,000 watching streams before the game even unlocked, and it’s obvious: this wasn’t just a release.
It was an eruption.
Meanwhile, big-budget games with teams of thousands and marketing budgets that could fund a small country are face-planting. Dragon Age: The Veilguard peaked at a paltry 89,000 players, a humiliating number for a series once considered RPG royalty.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows fared even worse at 64,000. And Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? A pathetic 13,000, which is basically the population of a midwestern town.
The point isn’t just that indies can win. It’s that they’re crushing the competition while charging a fraction of the price.
The $20 Flex
Let’s not gloss over this, Silksong costs $20. Twenty bucks for a game that offers more than 30 hours of content.
Players were so hungry, they probably would’ve forked over $70 without blinking. Team Cherry didn’t go there.
They priced it like they still live in the real world, not some corporate fantasyland where every re-skinned open-world slog is “premium entertainment.”
The contrast with AAA greed couldn’t be starker. EA and Ubisoft keep pushing $70 titles that barely function at launch.
Sony torched half a billion dollars on Concord, only for the game to die within two weeks. Meanwhile, Team Cherry spent years in the lab and delivered something polished, massive, and, judging by the numbers, worth the endless wait.
Waiting Paid Off
Remember, Silksong wasn’t even supposed to be a full game. It started life as DLC for the original Hollow Knight, then ballooned into something bigger.
Fans sat through years of silence and memes about it being vaporware. Some gave up hope entirely. Then came the last-minute twist: a shadow-drop announcement barely two weeks before release.
That gamble worked. Hype hit a fever pitch, storefronts crashed, and the bug army swarmed in.
This wasn’t just a launch, oh no, no, no, it was vindication. Players were tired of waiting, sure, but they got exactly what they wanted.
AAA Meltdowns
If you’re a developer at a giant publisher right now, this has to sting. Years of crunch, committee meetings, and “live service integration” sessions, all to get out-performed by a $20 indie about a bug.
Take Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad. Once hyped as the next big thing, it arrived half-baked and clinging to outdated live-service mechanics.
Instead of revitalizing the studio, it became a meme. Or Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which should’ve been BioWare’s grand comeback. Instead, it tanked so hard even former developers publicly mocked EA’s excuses.
Compare that to Team Cherry. Small team. No flashy trailers every six months.
Just a long silence and then, boom, a game that literally breaks storefronts.
It’s cliché to say indies make games with “heart,” but numbers don’t lie. Players gravitate to experiences that feel fresh, not boardroom-approved sequels.
Silksong isn’t alone here. Other indies like Repo (271,000 peak) and Schedule 1 (459,000 peak) have been building audiences without giant PR budgets.
Then you look at AAA failures that cost hundreds of millions. Concord reportedly burned through $500 million before dying in two weeks.
That’s more money than Team Cherry will probably ever spend in their lifetimes, yet Concord couldn’t keep a couple thousand people interested.
The lesson here is brutal but simple: you can’t buy passion.
Storefront Chaos
The funniest part of launch day wasn’t just the player counts. It was watching entire platforms buckle. Steam went down right as the game unlocked.
The eShop booted players out with error codes. Xbox buyers got slapped with “try again later.”
Social media loved it. Memes about “one bug defeating the combined forces of Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo” spread instantly. Screenshots of carts stuck at checkout became badges of honor. Some joked Steam “sacrificed itself to delay Silksong one last time.”
You don’t get that kind of cultural moment with a mid AAA launch. Nobody’s memeing about Assassin’s Creed Shadows numbers. They’re ignoring it entirely.
The big takeaway here is less about Silksong itself, though it deserves the hype, and more about what it represents.
Gamers are voting with their wallets. They’re tired of broken promises and $70 disappointments. They’re flocking to games that actually deliver.
The AAA industry can keep spending fortunes on safe bets, but if those “safe bets” flop harder than a bug-themed indie, maybe the safe bet isn’t so safe anymore.
Indie studios don’t need to outspend the giants. They just need to out-create them. And judging by the numbers, they already have.
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